The process of curating the Making Sense exhibition resulted this book; with a forward by Tony Cunningham of twentytwentyone, photography of studios by Valeria Armeni, and our conversation with the designers in an essay written by us.
Also included is a book list by Jasper Morrison who has chosen 11 books for the show.
“They* all agreed to participate in a group discussion with Tony and us at our studio on one hot summer evening. In fact, this booklet was initially planned to be simply the transcription of that round table discussion. Although we had a very enjoyable, engaging conversation, with so many people speaking, the transcript didn’t really work as a comprehensible text to read. Instead, we are borrowing some of their words in between the following chapters, including their thoughts on running a design studio in London and making sense of everything involved, and hope to explain what and how these designers’ work resonates with us.”
From introduction (p.11)
*Elliott Denny, Simon Jones, Michael Marriott, Ian McIntyre, Jack Neville, and Eleanor Pritchard
Read a chapter from
Making Sense
By Mentsen
From chapter Act of Looking, Noticing (p39-43):
Here we have a sort of a “connect the dots” game, but there are only two dots. One representing “Making” and another “Sense”, and you need to connect the two. We imagined how people may play this — would it be a straight line, or complex squiggle line? To visualise the concept of the exhibition at twentytwentyone and this booklet accompanying the show, we made two lines, each connecting the two dots, that together look like hand and heart.
Our world is full of objects, things good and bad, yet at the same time, the tide of the information society keeps rising and many things are slowly being replaced by “non-things”, digital information stored in vast data centres around the world. We’ve become so used to seeing the world through our smart phones and being “connected”, that we forget to actually look at something right in front of us. A Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in the preface of his book Non-things, “As information hunters, we are becoming blind to still, inconspicuous things, to what is common, the incidental and the customary — the things that do not attract us but ground us in being”. In this information society, as our idea of value in things gets diminished, ownership of objects seems less desirable in our future, and instead the idea of having access to a shared resource may become popular.
This reminds us of a visual by an Italian architectural collective, Superstudio from 1970s Italy, a very stylised grid city in glass, with people living in their idea of utopia, “life without objects”. People are free from things, or consumerism. Risa encountered this in the college library, in a book that accompanied the 1972 MoMa exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape (we bought our own copy eventually when we got paid jobs, as it was out of print and cost more than £100 from a second-hand bookshop then!). It was a strikingly cool book, beautifully set in Akzidenz Grotesk, a dust cover made with folded tracing paper with several photographic cutouts of iconic objects that moved freely on the cover.
Life without objects… Could that be the remedy to our environmental crisis? Unlikely, seeing how access to every information and services depends on resource-hungry digital devices, and the energy intensive ecosystem that supports those devices (and the sinister mega corporations that own the systems we all rely on, but that’s another story…). As a result we see a worrying side of this trend, for example, in the hire e-bike schemes run by private companies. For these types of machines, the requirement for aesthetics is low on the company’s priorities, just eye-catching and different to be recognised. Be cheap to produce and maintain, and robust to withstand use, or abuse. But as you don’t own the bicycle, users don’t really care about their appearance, or the mess they create on the pavement, both physically and visually. The whole pick-up and drop-off system requires oversupply to meet spikes in demand, and that in turn requires more of the public space. While there are obvious benefits to the scheme that may outweigh the negatives, for us who love bicycles, riding them, their history and their design, this trend feels a real shame.
Owning something also comes with responsibility. You care for it. It becomes something close to your heart, and you keep using it. Wouldn’t this be better, than chasing the convenience of a sharing economy that requires more resources to overbuild and to maintain due to the lack of care?
Owning a bicycle, learning how everything works and how to fix it, is an empowering experience as a child, and this may have planted a seed in Yasu’s head, of a fascination in the design of things. Like the often-used phrase “thinking with your hands”, you learn and think by doing. Using hands, and making something with hands, gives clarity in the understanding of the material and the object. It nurtures curiosity, and it teaches us how to look, and we notice more things. It guides us on how to think. And understanding how to do things is a good feeling, it gives you satisfaction.
As designers of objects, we are interested in things that hold our attention, something with quality or substance that you need to give time to appreciate it. And when we design, we aim to design objects that have this quality. There are many different aspects in design that could be rooted in cultural or generational differences and preferences. But there are certain elements of design that we feel are more relevant to what we do and should explore here. They are; utility, typology, construction, process, and aesthetics.
